Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

Online marketing has really become a necessity and an obsession for many American entrepreneurs. Everywhere I go, to every meeting I participate, there is some slant toward promoting your business on the web, with a lot of tools and a lot of cool tricks. Yet one needs to adapt it to the classic activities that are performed offline that remain very important for many segments.

A short video section of the presentation given by me and Daniele to the agents of Century 21 Grant Realty.
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I have met many exceptional guys in my life, but I have met very few outstanding teams. In our world it seems like everybody is trying to become a superstar or a prima donna. This is true also of corporations. All those I have in contact with had all kinds of complex procedures and rituals that were only aimed at making people working together or at restraining the individual power so to avoid internal fights. Sometimes the “glue” that holds the team together is some form of social habit or more that is applied with no judgment.

Daniele Bogiatto, Terry Ogburn and Karen Selby

I have a little story to tell about this that comes from my past. In 2001, at the beginning of the new millennium, the .com bubble was in full swing and I sent to work for the major Swedish telco company that had created a special team to build one of the first UMTS portals. In a nutshell it was the first project aimed at bringing the Web on mobile phones. Scandinavia in general and Sweden in particular are very strong on mobile phone network since, due to the wide expanses of the land and the fact that very little of it is actually inhabited, it is not quite economic to build a regular phone network, based on wires or fiber optic. So out of necessity Sweden and Finland have become some of the world leaders in mobile phone technology.

The project was big and was spanning several European nations. I had been chosen as the chief of content development for the Italian portal. The project was exciting both because it was quite innovative (too much for that time as we soon found out) but also because it gave me the chance of flying to Stockholm every so often and meet people from all over Europe and be exposed to very different cultures.

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Tomorrow I will have an important meeting with three people that will have a fundamental role in my future professional life. One of them is of course my business partner and friend Daniele, with whom I will be sharing all of my future endeavors in the US and in Europe; the second is Terry Ogburn, a very interesting businessman and chief of business development at Century 21 Grant Realty of Florida, in Seminole. The third is a lady, Karen Selby, the broker.

Terry, Karen & me in one of the best Chinese restaurants in Pinellas

Our story begins about four months ago. My investing career was moving slower than I wanted and, after talking with my wife Maria who is also my personal business coach, I decided to immerse myself in the local market and see how people worked around me. I opened up Craigslist, the most important free announcement network in the US, and I found a posting about two real estate brokerage firms that were looking for new agents. I contacted both of them, and only person who actually returned my call was Terry.

I explained him that I had done my real estate training at a formal Florida school and was considering activating my license as I wanted to see how the market really worked in the field. We arranged a meeting (intended to be a formal presentation) and a couple of days later I was entering for the first time the office of Century 21 in Seminole.

As I stepped into the door, I noticed a message board displaying “Welcome Roberto Mazzone”. Despite the misspelling of my last name, I was impressed by the attention to detail and the positive effort to make me feel like at home. The following presentation was more like a two way discussion and lasted twice as long as expected. At the end I knew very well three things:
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